BACKGROUND Spiritual care for people with dementia who are in nursing homes is one aspect of the holistic care provided by nurses. A number of studies have explored the concepts of spirituality and religiosity, but fewer studies describe how nurses provide spiritual care in practice. The Purpose of the study was thus to investigate how nurses and care workers can provide spiritual care for peop...

As part of a cross-sectional, quantitative study on adjustment factors in long-term breast cancer survival, 52 women were asked to write in their own words how religious and spiritual factors played a part in their understanding of and coping with this illness. A subsample of 39 women responded to this question. The qualitative method of content analysis was used to define meaning units, descri...

Addressing spirituality in therapy is not only important for a substantial number of clients but many therapists also regard it as potentially valuable. However, practitioners report difficulties and confusion regarding how to work with spiritual difference, especially when clients’ spiritual beliefs are perceived as undermining their psychological well-being. The current study aimed to explore...

It is unclear whether the development of ‘‘Western’’ psychology and psychiatry, in the last century or so, has overall actually been good for our mental health. The article argues that a deficiency has been the lack of attention paid by these disciplines, to the spiritual component of the Self. There are, however, psychologies’’ developed within religious traditions, which integrate the spiritu...

A clinical approach to the understanding of disturbances of the psyche that otherwise would be regarded as pathological states of mind is described. A parallel is drawn between psychoanalytic object relations theory and "spiritual object relations," working from the premise that mind comes before matter. A number of clinical examples illustrate how both psychological and spiritual interpretatio...

In this paper I identify a link between the problem of explaining anomalous access to information (‘psi’ or ‘psychic ability’) and the problem of giving an account of the nature of consciousness (‘the mind-body problem’). I argue that progress with understanding psi requires selecting a suitable ontological model for dealing with the mind-body problem. I review alternatives and argue, on philos...

AIM To investigate nursing students' perceptions of spirituality and spiritual care. BACKGROUND Spirituality is an essential part of holistic care but often neglected in practice. Barriers to spiritual care include limited educational preparation, negative attitudes towards spirituality, confusion about nurses' role, perceptions of incompetence and avoidance of spiritual matters. There is lim...